UPCOMING EVENTS

Your new AMD graphics card is probably using a few too many watts, and you can put a stop to that.

AMD released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition driver 16.7.1 update today that fixes the Radeon RX 480‘s power-consumption rate, and you can download it right here. The company marketed the 480, which starts at $200, as a powerful mass-market GPU that is also efficient. Early reports from consumers, however, found that the chip would occasionally draw more power than it should. AMD responded quickly and said it would get to work on the problem, and now it has rolled out that solution.

“In this driver, we’ve implemented a change to address power distribution on the Radeon RX 480,” reads a post on the AMD Facebook page. “This change will lower current drawn from the PCIe bus. Separately, we’ve also included an option to reduce total power with minimal performance impact.”

That option to reduce power is under the Global Settings menu in the Radeon Settings. You can activate it by toggling the “compatibility” option.

Of course, purposefully limiting the performance of your GPU is a tough thing to accept, but AMD says that it is making optimizations in popular games that should offset any drawbacks. It noted that games like The Witcher 3, Metro: Last Light, and Far Cry 4 all saw significant improvements and should run just fine in compatibility mode.